Virtual spotlighted advertising for tennis videos Chia-Hu Chang a, * , Kuei-Yi Hsieh b , Ming-Che Chiang b , Ja-Ling Wu a,b a Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei 10617, Taiwan b Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei 10617, Taiwan article info Article history: Received 14 July 2009 Accepted 14 March 2010 Available online 20 March 2010 Keywords: Tennis video analysis Visual intrusiveness Sports video advertising Image advertising Virtual advertising Foveation model Virtual product placement Gestalt effect Ad-blindness effect Subliminal perception abstract How to effectively and less-intrusively deliver the advertising message by spatially replacing regions with advertisements in a period of exposure time for sports videos has been known as a challenging prob- lem. The size, placement locations, and the representation of advertisement are the critical factors that have significant impact on both the recognition effectiveness and the perceived intrusiveness. In this paper, we take advertising theory, psychology, and computational aesthetics into account to develop a novel virtual advertising mechanism, called virtual spotlighted advertising (ViSA), for tennis videos. We utilize the extraneous visual acuity of viewers while watching the attractive object, such that they are not much disturbed from the progress of the game, and at the same time, the inserted advertisement can effectively deliver its message across to them. We propose a framework and realize an exemplary system to serve ViSA. The system automatically detects the candidate insertion points in both temporal and spatial domains and estimates the most effective region for visual communication. Then, the har- monically re-colored advertisements with foveation model based non-uniform transparency, are pro- jected onto the court. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ViSA in terms of recall and recognition. Moreover, the induced visual intrusiveness is limited by the proposed innovative representation style. Ó 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Recently, the rapid technical advances in video coding and broadband network delivery have led a huge amount of video con- tent distribution. Either the traditional broadcasting or webcasting, the considerable population of the sports video audiences brings forth great advertising boom indeed. Therefore, the sports video advertising dramatically draws a lot of attention due to its poten- tial commercial benefits [2–5]. The traditional advertising model for broadcast sports videos is based mainly on the 30-s commer- cials. In order to watch the sports videos without missing the high- lights, most audiences found these advertisements, which regularly interrupt sports programs, boring and intrusive, but they were forced to endure them. With the growing popularity of IPTV and the advent of intelligent digital video recorder (DVR), video viewers are no longer passive audiences. DVR technology allows viewers to skip all or most of the commercials. Facing diminished passive audiences, advertisers have to revise or reinvent their advertising strategies and promote their products in other ways. Most recently, besides the traditional 30-s commercials in the sports video breaks, the image advertising is applied to the sports videos. Here, the image advertising [6] is a tactic for promoting an overall brand perception of a company, a product, or a service in- stead of specific attributes. Advertisers attempt to replace specific regions in videos with advertisements to support the image advertising. According to the essential characteristic of advertising media, the advertisements can be divided into two categories: the physi- cal advertisement and the virtual advertisement. The trademarks or slogans which appeared on the billboards or printed on the court in reality are physical advertisements. On the other hand, the virtual advertisements are those which are inserted fictionally into sports videos by using computer aided blending techniques. For example, the overlaid logos on the screen or the virtually pro- jected logos on the court in the tennis video [7] are virtual adver- tisements produced by different insertion methods. Generally, since physical advertisements originally appeared on the billboard at the fringes of the court, audiences do not feel dis- turbed while watching sports videos. However, with fixed content and locations of advertising, people usually adapt to the presence of physical advertisements and easily filter them out of their vision, which is the so-called ad-blindness effect. Thus, the advertising effect produced in this way is limited. In contrast, the virtual advertisement is paid more attention due to its capability of per- mitting dynamic and switchable content for advertising. Generally, 1047-3203/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jvcir.2010.03.006 * Corresponding author. Fax: +886 2 2362 1776. E-mail address: chchang@cmlab.csie.ntu.edu.tw (C.-H. Chang). J. Vis. Commun. Image R. 21 (2010) 595–612 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect J. Vis. Commun. Image R. journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jvci